Facebook's apps were caught doing something naughty, but the site seems in no hurry to punish its app partners. (Source: Kim White Bloomberg)

Site shared users names and friends, including those with the strictest privacy settings

The
Wall Street Journal's
investigative staff have unleashed serious
allegations against the world's largest network Facebook and
its partners. According to the report, the site's partners have
been intentionally and blatantly violating its privacy policies.
Makers of some of the site's most popular apps have been sharing
users names with advertisers, something strictly
prohibited under the site's terms of service.

App
makers reportedly have even shared the info of users who have their
privacy set to the strictest settings. Users with less strict
settings may also have had the list of their friends shared, which in
turn could affect users with stricter settings,
second-hand.

Reportedly over 10 million users were effected by
the violation of terms of service.

The breach of privacy is
part of an increasingly lucrative scheme known as data mining.
Today data mining allows advertisers to better target their audience,
by maintaining vast databases of information detailing various
individual's behavior and tastes. Data mining companies call
upon the services of heavily trafficked sites like Facebook and
Google to deliver vast amounts of user data. While many users
don't realize it, their name is instantly associated with a lengthy
record of their internet activity and purchases.

Facebook is
claiming the scheme, which brought its partners lucrative advertising
money, was "inadvertent" -- an innocent accident.

States
a spokesperson to The
Wall Street Journal,
"A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user's
Internet browser or by an application. [Knowledge of an ID]
does not permit access to anyone's private information on Facebook.
Our technical systems have always been complemented by strong policy
enforcement, and we will continue to rely on both to keep people in
control of their information."

According to The
Wall Street Journal, 10
of the site's most popular apps, subscribed to by many its over
500 million active users, were involved in the scheme.
Three of the apps involved were -- Zynga Game Network Inc.'s
FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and
FrontierVille. Farmville was among three apps thats also sold
information on users' friends to advertisers, collected in violation
with the site's terms of service.

Facebook has announced no
plans to discipline these partners, despite the fact that some of
them were clearly caught violating its terms of service.

The
debacle comes just a month after West
Wing screenwriter
Aaron Sorkin portrayed the site's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in
a less than flattering manner in the film The
Social Network.
It also comes as the site struggles with its latest
addition, user "groups".

As pranks,
users have been adding
their friends to groups associated with taboos such as
pedophilia and terrorism, raising the possibility of legal trouble
for these friends. The site's founder was added to NAMBLA -- a
group supporting pedophilia. Users have no way of blocking
themselves from being added to groups, raising legal risks for them.
Once added, though, users can opt to leave a group at any time.
Facebook has defended the new feature, refusing to make
changes.

Facebook did recently roll out a privacy settings
control panel for apps, giving users more control over what
information is shared. One problem, though is that users can
still have their identities shared by friends, if their friends adopt
more lax privacy settings. There currently is no way to limit
what information your friends share with app makers and advertisers,
including your name and potentially other info.

For their
part, some app makers claim that they only mistakenly sold private
user data. They said they were merely selling advertisers
referring links, a common practice, and had no idea those referring
links contained personal info, such as the user's name. They,
in effect, blame Facebook for the technical error.

Others,
like FamilyBuilder, maker of the Family Tree application, admitted to
harvesting user data intentionally, but say that they kept user info
confidential. Family Tree reported passed on info to data
mining firm RapLeaf, that in turn deposit custom-tailored cookies on
users' computers to further track their activities. Info from
these cookies was sold to a number of other firms, including Google
subsidiary Invite Media.

"When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." -- Sony BMG attorney Jennifer Pariser